She’d probably followed the divorce in the tabloids; I hadn’t discussed it with her and Kevin wouldn’t have, either. “I think it was because of all that mess. Probably an act of kindness or pity, I think. He didn’t even tell the lawyers about it.”

Growing up, my parents had one couch, wrapped in a plastic liner. I considered their wisdom, protecting their polyurethane couch with even more plastic, as I watched a sweating orange droplet fall from Rose’s over-full glass onto my eight-thousand-dollar dove-gray sofa.

She made a grunting noise as we heard the front door open and slam in echo. “Sorry, sorry,” Meredith sputtered, kicking off a pair of pink sneakers and folding her feet underneath her next to me on the opposite couch. “I was up with Sunny last night and then took a nap. My internal clock is still on London time. And there’s a thick camp of paparazzi right outside your gate.”

Rose’s eyebrow remained raised as she sat sipping her drink. Merry used to adjust to time zones instantly; motherhood had blunted her edge and evidently Rose judged that. “How is Miss Soleil?” she asked.

Merry blew out a breath. “Sweet. Tiring. Teenagers,” she said with a knowing smirk, before realizing that neither Rose nor I had children. “Well, you remember what it was like, being that age.”

I was sure that my upbringing—kids picking on me because I had a funny last name, being the only nonwhite face in a sea of students, before we moved to the Bay Area when I was twelve—was vastly different from Merry’s teenage years. She’d told us before that she had been on the JV cheerleading squad and asked to the senior prom when she was only a sophomore. But I said, “I can imagine.”

“Only”—she fussed with a throw pillow—“She’s been asking about doing more in the entertainment world.”

“Like stripping?” Rose said, obviously joking, but Merry’s head snapped up.

“No, but almost as bad as.” She gave a grimace. “She thinks that because she’s the daughter of Cherry Gloss and the stepchild of Raul X. Martinez”—this she said in a hoity-toity accent, although from what I knew, Soleil did not speak like this at all—“and she has sixty thousand followers on social media, she is entitled to leverage that into something.”

“Like stripping?” Rose repeated, smiling harder. Merry threw the pillow at her. Luckily, she missed.

“No. Like modeling. When I asked her who would hire her to walk their catwalk, you know what she said? Any one of your designer friends. Can you believe that?”

“Nepotism wins again,” I said lightly, trying to keep the sour note out of my voice.

Merry poured herself a glass of white wine and gulped down half of it. “I already hate that she’s on Instagram so much, with her life so public like that, but at least I’ve given her basic safety pointers so she’s not posting where she is when she’s actually there. But you remember what it was like before. All that attention.”

Attention can be loaded. Attention can be good or bad.

We murmured, commiseration or agreement, I wasn’t sure. Rose sucked in her cheeks and jiggled her glass of ice cubes in the ensuing awkward silence. Merry looked around. “I like what you’ve done to the place,” she said, changing the subject. We hadn’t spent so many consecutive days with one another in a long while. I’d had the painting for months but Rose hadn’t been over to my house for probably years.

“Thanks.”

“So have you considered the reunion tour?” Rose asked, setting her glass down on my coffee table and getting down to it.

I shook my head slightly, confused. I’d thought this meeting was about the movie premiere. Or Cassidy. “But without Cass—”

“I was reading stuff last night,” Merry began, then closed her mouth.

“I read about it too,” I said quietly.

The worst part about the tabloids is that they find things and publish them with little regard for how people might feel about the information. When I stumbled upon the method of Cassidy’s death, I wondered if her parents would want that out there. And something squeezing her beautiful throat—her soft, sweet vocal cords—was almost too much to bear. Was it symbolic?

Merry’s voice became firmer. “I don’t think she did it.”

I reached out a hand to gently touch her. “Mer . . .”

“It’s just not like Cassidy,” she repeated.

“How do you know, though? We hadn’t spoken to her in months. Years,” I said.

“Why would someone like Cass just decide, out of the blue, to kill herself? It doesn’t make any sense. I could maybe wrap my mind around it if it was fifteen years ago and she’d just left the group, broke the contract, lost endorsement deals, was a social pariah, but now? After all this time?”

“You don’t know what was going on in her personal life,” I argued. “Stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with us, or money, or other friends.”

“I just say there’s reasonable doubt, that’s all.”

“I don’t,” Rose interjected, crunching down on an ice cube. “We knew from the start that Cassidy wasn’t really ready for any kind of confrontational lifestyle. Do you remember the first time we met her? How she said she was never interested in being a real artist until a reality show competition? She buckled whenever she was told to do something. She was too sensitive. People like that don’t do well in this business.”

“But,” I said slowly, “she wasn’t in the business anymore.”

I’d known Rose for twenty years and knew she could spew some vitriol, but I didn’t know where this animosity had come from.

When Cassidy had soft-auditioned for Gloss—when Marsha brought Cass to L.A.—Rose could have been nicer. After we’d left the label’s building and gotten lunch, we chewed on our straws and mulled over Viv’s replacement. Rose had been critical of Cassidy’s meek demeanor, of her disinterest in pursuing the dream, of the brown color of her hair. But Marsha liked her, and it was undeniable that she made us sound better. “We’ll make her pull her weight,” I’d said, and the others had agreed. “Otherwise, we’ll toss her out,” Rose had said.

Cassidy had done what she was told to do. She’d signed her contract within twenty-four hours of our meeting and the label asked her to move out to L.A. immediately. Within a week, we were installed in the same three-bedroom apartment, with Cass and I doubling up in the shared room. She was on the quiet side and kept to herself around the rest of us. She tidied her portion of the living space, took great lengths to work out and keep to her diet, and made it to all of the appointments we were obligated to keep.

It had been nonstop preparation leading up to the album release. Big Disc emphasized Cassidy’s role in the group as a means to pump a little more publicity, flaunting the fact that yet another Sing It contestant had found success in her chosen profession. They wanted to time the album release with the second season of Sing It, America! as a cross-promotion, since they had a stake in both ventures. So all four of us were working, though not really being, alongside one another. Cassidy’s assimilation into Gloss was pushed to the backs of our minds. My immediate concern was to not fall asleep from the slowly creeping exhaustion that spread over my limbs and settled behind my eyes. Merry, who grew up with morning swim meets and fitting in cheerleading practice and seven hundred extracurricular activities, seemed to keep up fine, and Rose, with a determined grin that bared her teeth when she was especially tired, did better than Cassidy and me. We two were a little out of shape, a little more overwhelmed.

But even though Rose believed that Cassidy was a pushover, that didn’t automatically mean that Cass would voluntarily leave this world now. Meredith’s point of view was more appealing. I reconsidered. I turned to her.

“Well, who else would want Cassidy gone?”

“I made a list,” Merry said, pulling out her phone.

“Oh, please!” Rose sounded exasperated, but Merry went on.

“Maids, groundskeeper, anyone who worked on her house. Former stalkers—who could still be current stalkers—the roommate of the guy who probably never got over her . . .”

“This is ridiculous,” Rose interrupted. “It could have been a postal worker. Someone who got mad if she cut him off in traffic and then followed her home. Anybody. Why don’t we talk to the detective? The police know more than we do, anyway. Maybe you’ll listen to someone with authority about this and start to accept that, yes, Cassidy was a sad person.”

“I mean, after that boyfriend—it was probably hard,” Merry said.

I nodded in agreement. At least the world hadn’t been convinced that Kevin broke my arm. He’d broken only my trust.

“We should talk to them anyway,” I said. “The police, I mean. We might be able to give them more information if it was a stalker. All those piles of letters . . .”